Google Street view is coming to the inside of your stores! Probably old news for some of you but this is the first time that I have seen it and I like it! I needed to get some parts on my bike replaced today so I looked up a bike shop that I had used before and noticed a street view icon on one of their shop images. http://g.co/maps/uwtkv

Clicking on the image brings up a really nice 360 degree view of the inside of the store.

What excites me about this is it appears that they plan on getting the entire layout of larger stores.

When I took my bike in I was able to talk with the owner and he said that about 2 weeks ago a few “Google guys” (his words) came in and asked him if he wanted to do the “Google groupon” thing and if they could take pictures of inside the shop for his Google listing. He hadn’t seen the 360 view on Google maps yet but I was able to tell him it was cool and it looked good. He said he hasn’t decide yet on whether he is going to be doing the “Google groupon” thing yet because the deal is 1/2 of his regular price and Google gets half of that. He said it would be nice for advertising and getting attention but thought that it might be a bit heaver load and more work than it’s worth. Great guy.

Check out the listing for yourself if you want to see it. http://g.co/maps/uwtkv

What do you think of this? Will this help you decide what stores you want to go to? If you own a store, will you be allowing Google to do this?

Had a great time this weekend attending the HTML5.tx developer conference. Lots of great developers and designers in the Austin area. Was fun to meet people, learn, and review technologies and techniques for building better experiences online. Some of the things discussed at the conference were

• HTML5 & DOM APIs
• Advanced CSS selectors
• HTML5 Video
• LESS (css)
• Modernizer, Yepnope, and Polyfills
• CSS3 and animations
• Building for experience not browser

How to get EC2 public IP from command line or bash script

Recently, while helping out with the OpenPhoto project, I created a bash script that would print out the Ubuntu server’s IP address if it was not installed on Amazon’s EC2. If it is installed on EC2 it would get the publicly accessible IP address of the machine and print that out instead.

#!/bin/bash
# finding IP address and compensating for possible EC2 installation
EC2=`curl --silent --connect-timeout 1 http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-hostname`
if [[ $EC2 != "" ]]; 
then
    IP=`echo $EC2 | sed -rn 's/ec2-(.*?)\.compute.*/\1/p' | sed 's/-/./g'`
else
    IP=`ifconfig eth0 | grep 'inet addr:' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}'`
fi

Tired of Google Chrome cacheing resources while you are trying to build a web app or site?

Here is how you can disable the Google Chrome cache:

• open developer console
• click settings gear in bottom right
• check “Disable cache” under Network heading

This is as of version 14